Early warfare

Girls on top

Spear-throwers of the world, unite!

IN THE lexicon of relations between women, their menfolk and sport (the golf widow, the soccer mom), there is little mention of the atlatl wife. But several were present on April 6th and 7th in the Nevada desert some 90km (55 miles) north of Las Vegas. The setting was Valley of Fire State Park, a stunning sweep of red sandstone cliffs, 4,000-year-old rock art, wild flowers and air-conditioned mobile homes that played host to the annual meeting of the World Atlatl Association.

The atlatlists, if they may be so called, are a group of enthusiasts who wish to restore to its former glory an ancient art that they fear is in danger of dying out: spear-throwing. To give their quest a certain amount of primitive street-cred they have borrowed the Aztec word for the main piece of equipment involved—not the spear itself, but the device used to throw it. This is a carefully shaped stick just under a metre long which acts as an extension of the human thrower's arm. The spear is balanced along it, with the blunt end snug against a hook. The other end is held by the hurler. The atlatl serves to amplify the hurler's arm movement in a way that allows a stone-tipped spear to be propelled at speeds of well over 150kph. The result, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, is a formidable long-range weapon system.

This is all delightfully eccentric (if no more so than the survival of that other hand-propelled weapon system, the bow and arrow). However, there is a serious point to it, for the atlatl may have played an important part in human evolution.

According to John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York State who studies the evolution of early projectile technology, the earliest known atlatl is a 27,000-year-old example from France, made of reindeer antler. However, the atlatl's ubiquity in human culture suggests to him that it was invented much earlier, presumably before people first ventured out of Africa about 70,000 years ago.

John Whittaker, an anthropologist at Grinnell College, Iowa, believes atlatls were social equalisers. An unassisted spear is a man's weapon. It requires strength and body mass to be effective, but with these attributes it is reasonably easy to hurl the projectile in the right direction. Using an atlatl, however, takes real skill, since the spear must be kept in the correct orientation until the moment of release. This, according to Dr Whittaker, means that dextrous women and children can wield a spear as well as muscular men.

Spears, of course, are dual-use technology. They can be employed for hunting (and have been, into historical times, taking game as varied as bison, kangaroos, whales and walruses). But they can also be used in war. In this context, the fact that women can wield them may be crucial. Warfare, particularly in hunter-gatherer societies, is often a hunt with women as the prize. Women who could hurl missiles would thus be at a significant advantage.

If that theory is correct, the atlatl wives of Fire Valley are no string-along appendages of their husbands. Instead, they are communing with their sisters of long ago in what would have been one of the first great assertions of feminism.